The best way to show students how the term “modernity” is wielded in this way is to highlight the variety of lifestyles that exist parallel to each other in the same era…

Gina Elia responds to the Genealogies of Modernity podcast

The genealogical description insists on erasing hundreds of years of Christian life. The writer awkwardly alludes to Christianity but cannot imagine that it has any real importance except as a machine for appropriating pagan practices.

Terence Sweeney critiques pop-genealogies of Halloween

His experience was that poetry—Romantic poetry in particular—had the potential to expand perception by rousing the imagination in a way that forged a new unity of self and world.

Ashton Arnoldy on modernity as real stage in human history

[T]the distinction we make today between inner realities (consciousness) and outer realities (the physical universe) is not final, nor is it an accurate basis for reconstructing… the pre-human past.

Ashton Arnoldy on modernity as real stage in human history

[T]he decline of sickness funds and early community-rated plans transformed a system rooted in voluntarism and mutual aid…

Grant Martsolf on the transition from industrial sickness funds to insurance plans in the United States

How does the past bear on the present? Has “modernity” always been around?

Ryan McDermott’s interview with the Spiritually Incorrect Podcast

If we read Virgil’s works closely, we can see how he anticipates a Christian view of creation in his approach to the pastoral…. His vision of pastoral poetry is more Christian than classical.

Mary Grace Mangano on Virgil’s Christian approach to creation

Early modern science emphasized an optical connection to the universe,' making its brilliance appear close enough to touch. Tragically, this optical achievement consigned the individual to reflect on an unbridgeable distance.

Michael Golec on the confluence of civilization and barbarism

Today, the very nature and purpose of the family snapshot has changed. What does it mean that the majority of our pictures of family have become dematerialized?

Arthur Aghajanian on family photographs and the transcendent

What the interiority of reflection reveals is that which is interior to everything that exists: their reality as God’s creation.

Ali Harfouch on Islamic theology and reflection in the modern age

The way to break the vicious cycle of Fascism and Anti-Fascism… is to embrace a more personalistic conception of the state which sees in the individual a meeting place of relationships of every kind.

Matthew Scarince on Christ Stopped at Eboli

Rosenberg reminds us that we can't assume modernity means a sundered sacrality. Rather, our discovery that we can produce the sacred means there is potentially more of it than ever before.

Lyle Enright reviews The Rise of Mass Advertising

Philosophy does not point toward an abstract transhistorical truth for humanity, but rather to a murky, historically contingent truth… the truth of historical and material conditions.

Joseph Natali on Horkheimer’s Discontinuity with the Ancients

It is only through the practice of an explicitly critical philosophy that a wholly stagnant self-affirming social order can be avoided.

Joseph Natali on Horkheimer critical theory and the meaning of philosophy

For Horkheimer, his method of critical theory, are the truest continuation of the initial philosophic project of the Western tradition.

Joseph Natali on Max Horkheimer and the critical role of Socrates

The conversations we have about Spare reveal the social mores that have solidified into shared beliefs about what we believe and have passed down as the proper modes of behaving and thinking. 

Luella D’Amico reviews a fallen prince's memoir

Past writers have updated Arthur for new audiences without sacrificing his essential kingship. If that's possible for Arthur, it should be possible for Charles and the British monarchy.

—Gabriel Schenk on what King Charles can learn from King Arthur.

We are witnessing a dehumanization of society driven by a covert, reductionist ideology. We need a return to a non-reductionist anthropology, rooted in classical conceptions of the human good.

Xavier Symons on public health, COVID, and Kheriaty’s ‘The New Abnormal’

Implicit in this wisdom saying is a sense of the incalculable—that one person is the whole world. This incalculable value transcends the rationalist’s quality of life calculations.

Anthony Shoplik on suffering and meaning in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men

There are two questions: ‘Should I have kids, knowing they will contribute to the climate crisis?’ and ‘Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face?’

Anthony Shoplik on having kids in the age of climate change